


asking for the taking

by cestmabiologie



Category: Castle Rock (TV)
Genre: Character Turned Into a Ghost, Gen, Other, Post-Season/Series 02 AU, also Chance is nb and no one can stop me
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-08
Updated: 2020-07-08
Packaged: 2021-03-05 06:34:15
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,122
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25140070
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cestmabiologie/pseuds/cestmabiologie
Summary: Joy comes back to Chance at the Star Gazer Lodge.
Relationships: Georgia "Chance" LaChance/Joy Wilkes
Comments: 1
Kudos: 5





	asking for the taking

**One.**

In the aftermath Chance is supposed to act like everything’s normal, so that’s what they do.

What’s normal is sitting on their stoop and picking at their guitar until their fingers want to bleed. There’s no joy in it, but forming chord shapes is a comfort. They can’t stomach the idea of their calluses growing soft.

What’s not normal is waiting for texts that stopped coming a long time ago.

What’s not normal is dialing a number just to hear a tinny recording tell them that the voice mailbox is full with the messages that they left when Joy stopped answering their calls.

Cabin 19 stays empty. The door isn’t even closed and the place is probably overrun with rats by now. Chance had tried to poke around the cabin once, but it hadn’t held any personality when Joy and her mom had lived there. Except for a curl of drawing paper that Chance wouldn’t touch, anybody at all could have been the last tenants.

No one’s come by yet to claim new management yet either, but eventually someone will figure out that no one is making money off the properties. That eventuality hasn’t come yet and most days Chance feels like they’re the only person in Castle County dumb enough not to stay away from this place.

After all, Joy got away from this shit-hole. Of course she’d want to move on and forget about it, even if that meant forgetting about them. Chance couldn’t unstick themself from Castle Rock, not like Joy, but they’ve unstuck themself from plenty of people before. They’ve peeled themself away like a wet shirt. It’s no big deal.

But instead they keep sitting around, pressing dents into their fingertips with guitar strings, plucking out tuneless accompaniment to their bad ideas. Being on their own is normal. Being normal is being hard and brittle like a tooth. Chance never got anywhere by being soft. They can’t stomach the idea.

**Two.**

It’s raining when Joy comes back. It’s not raining hard, not enough slide streams down the windows and not enough to make puddles. Just a spitting, piss-warm patter that couldn’t help grass grow.

Chance doesn’t see her coming. That rattles them; they should have noticed the rolling crunch of a car pulling up or the sharp sounds of footfalls on the gravel.

One moment Chance is alone and the next Joy softly says “Hey” and she’s there. No bag or backpack or anything. Just Joy.

“You came back?” They don’t mean for it to come out like a question, but it does. The rest of the question (to me?) stays unsaid at least. They don’t ask how she got back. They don’t care to know about that, not really.

Joy nods. She’s pale and her hair is wet and ropy. Strands stick or her forehead, her cheeks.

“My mom—”

But Chance is on their feet before she can finish. They hug her too tightly. Chance hugs her like she might leave again if they let go. They feel Joy heave in their arms and then they feel the chill of their jacket being soaked through to the skin. It smells like lake water gone brackish.

“I’m sorry,” Joy says, mortified, pulling back. More water is running from her nose.

“I do that sometimes now.”

“It’s okay,” Chance tells her and it’s the truth.

“It’s okay.”

Joy sniffs and nods and wipes her mouth on her rain-damp (lake-damp) sleeve.

“Okay.”

**Three.**

Chance aches for the past, when Joy would go out onto the water, but they’ll never say so. They think too often about the day Joy raised her arms to the wind, high as a fucking kite, breaking her own rules; Joy, launching herself into Castle Lake like a goddamned reckless fish and wrecking that cast on her wrist.

They don’t think about how, that day, they’d been trawling the lake for the rumoured body of a drowned man. They try not to think about that.

These days they don’t get past the shoreline. Joy will hold their hand as they stand at the edge of the water and let Castle Lake lap at the toes of their shoes. Joy’s fingernails bite into Chance’s hand every time. Each moon-shaped mark is an answer to a question that Chance won’t ever ask.

“I’m sorry,” Joy says. She says that a lot.

“It’s okay,” Chance tells her and it’s the truth. They squeeze Joy’s hand even though it hurts theirs to do it, “I never learned how to swim anyway.”

They don’t need the water. They have the entire grounds of the Star Gazer Lodge to themselves. They explore abandoned cabins together and take what others left behind. They break windows with rocks, laughing when the glass splinters, hopping back when the rocks bounce off the clapboard. They don’t spare cabin 19.

When Chance goes into town for supply runs, Joy never comes along. Chance doesn’t ask what she does, where she goes, what she is while they’re gone. She’s always there, waiting for them, when they get back.

At night Chance sits in bed and writes songs for Joy while she draws. Sometimes they curl up next to her and watch her work. They’re used to the way Joy’s skin always feels a little cold, a little damp. They’re used to the way that paper ripples under her fingers and the ink smears.

“My mom used to drag me around the country looking for something she called her Laughing Place,” Joy says. Chance presses their forehead into Joy’s shoulder and listens. Drawing comes with these confidences, like marking paper helps her to remember.

“Do you think this is your Laughing Place?” Chance asks.

Joy takes her time to consider the question, making tiny hatch marks on her page.

She presses her lips together, “I don’t think so, no. But being here is good.”

Chance laughs, “Sure, it’s good, Joy, but this place fucking sucks. I think we can do better.”

“Yeah, okay,” Joy says, and she’s laughing, too. “I think we can.”

Chance tries to picture the world outside of Castle Rock and can only picture gaps in a map like missing teeth. They’ve never been outside of Maine, never wandered farther from home than Derry. But Joy’s been everywhere and then some.

“You won’t go away or something when we try to leave this place will you?” Joy keeps drawing but tilts her head to lean it against Chance’s. Everything about her is so, so reassuringly solid.

“I don’t think so,” she says. “I don’t think it works that way.”

Chance’s mouth is dry from everything they’ve avoided saying. Even that much acknowledgement feels unsafe to taste.

“I want to see where we can go.”

**Author's Note:**

> "It's asking for the taking  
> Trembling, shaking  
> Oh, my heart is aching  
> [...]  
> It's asking for the taking  
> Come run with me now"  
> \- "Let the River Run"//Carly Simon
> 
> Thank you for reading! Please kudos + comment if you enjoyed!


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